Can't get Webmatrix.WebData for Simple Membership referenced in MVC5?

Question

I'm trying to use Simple Membership in an MVC 5 project. I followed a video tutorial on a test project on my machine and was able to get it to work. Now I'm ready to implement it on a new website but when I get to the step of making a reference for Webmatrix.Data and Webmatrix.WebData I don't have the option in the References/Assemblies/Extensions section. I went to NuGet and tried to add WebMatrix and saw where is said it was legacy and to use AspNet.WebPages.WebData which I then installed through NuGet. Still no reference available for Webmatrix.

So, I looked at the references of the project that was working and found that there was a Packages/Microsoft.AspNet.WebPages.WebData.3.2.3 folder and copied that to my current projects folder. I then made a manual reference to the WebMatrix.dll in that folder and made sure that it was listed in my packages.config file like my working project. That seemed to have fixed my issue where it my pages were referencing the System.Web.Security.

However, in my Global.asax page I need to have the following

WebSecurity.InitializeDatabaseConnection("DbConnection", "Users", "UserId", "UserName", autoCreateTables: true);

I'm getting an error with that. It says 'object' does not contain a definition for 'InitializeDatabaseConnection and the using WebMatrix.WebData is grayed out at the top. When I type WebSecurity and look at the options through intellisense I have very few options and InitializeDatabaseConnection is definitely not there. I can see the reference to WebMatrix.Data and WebMatrix.WebData listed in my References section and there doesn't seem to be any errors associated with that.

I've tried to do some Google searches and can't find anything about the issue. I've been at this for several hours and I'm pulling my hair out trying to get this to work. Please, any suggests would be really helpful...I'm at a complete loss.

Answer 1

I had NuGet install Microsoft.AspNet.WebPages.WebData, Microsoft.AspNet.WebPages.Data and Microsoft.AspNet.WebPages (all v3.2.4).

Then I added a reference to WebMatrix.WebData by browsing to the package (.....\packages\Microsoft.AspNet.WebPages.WebData.3.2.4\lib\net45\WebMatrix.WebData.dll).

And everything worked fine, with

using System.Web.Security;
using WebMatrix.WebData;